Reflections
by crazy random happenstance
Summary: 1977 - two years since the Marauders publically humiliated Severus Snape, ending his friendship with Lily Evans forever, and it is time to reflect on what was, and what might have been.


_I've always loved Severus Snape as a character, particularly in his teenage years, which is why I wrote this; I feel that a lot of the things that happened to him while he was at school have made him what he was as an adult. Essentially, this is a simple reflection on what happened in Severus' fifth year, two years on. Hopefully I'll also be able to write some reflections from some of the other characters' points of view at some point._

_**Disclaimer:**__ I do not own any characters, places, ideas or anything related to the Harry Potter world._

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_The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain. _The rain in Scotland just falls everywhere, Severus thought bitterly, pulling his knees to his chest. He was sitting in his empty dorm room, staring out the window at the rain that was falling onto the ground below at such a rate it was almost impossible to see anything. It always seemed to be raining at Hogwarts; there were probably about three weeks of the year when it was nice enough to be called sunny, but the rest of the time, if it wasn't raining (or drizzling, or spitting, or any other form of rain-like precipitation) it was overcast and generally dull. It wasn't that Severus didn't like the rain, because it certainly reflected his mood ninety-nine percent of the time, and it certainly made things atmospheric; it was a shame he wasn't an artist or something like that, because there were times when the castle really did look beautiful in the rainy mist. However, it also meant that he couldn't go outside, unless he wanted to invoke comments from people like bloody Potter about his sodden appearance when he returned to school, and it was outside where Severus did most of his reading. He disliked the library, and people laughed at him if he read in the common room. It left him with almost nowhere to go. He liked rain? No, that had been a lie. He didn't like it at all.

He had been sitting here for almost half an hour now, he guessed, just staring out the window. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the people that normally occupied his dorm room were probably sitting in the common room, talking loudly about things no-one actually cared about, meaning that for once, Severus had the room to himself. Though he could have used it for reading - the tree he sat under normally when he wanted to read was currently being half-drowned by the skies - he'd sat down to take a look out the window, and here he had remained. His book was on the bed beside him, but it hadn't even been opened. Anyone who knew Severus well (though very few people fell into that category) would have been surprised, because there was hardly a moment when his nose wasn't in a book; he walked down the corridors reading, he spent his lunchtimes outside, reading, he ate his meals with a book for company. In fact, he spent so much time reading that it was surprising he hadn't turned into a book himself. He wasn't sure if that sort of human transfiguration was possible, but he could look it up later. In a book.

Severus watched a single raindrop run down the window pane, ploughing on its own journey regardless of any other droplets that got in its way. It had its purpose, to run to the bottom of the window, and nothing was going to stop it. It was rather like him, really, Severus thought. He didn't know what he wanted to achieve in life, but he knew that he was going to prove that the years of reading non-stop had made him into something far better than an arrogant prat who wasn't going to make anything of his life. He wanted so much to be better than the people who made his life hell at school, to show that he didn't fight them back for a reason. One day he would show Potter and Black that they'd been wrong to cross Severus Snape, and the taste of revenge would be sweet, although he couldn't forget that Potter, for all his sins, had saved his life last year. Idiot. Without Lily, it wasn't really worth him having a life. There were times when Severus thought that it would have been better if the werewolf had torn him limb from limb. But just this week, the hope that their relationship would be repaired had come back to him, and he was glad that he hadn't given up. He wanted nothing more than to go back to being best friends with Lily.

It was sitting here, staring out the window, that Severus had really come to realise how much he'd lost in losing Lily last year, how much he wanted her back. He'd said something stupidly, feeling, as he so often did, trapped, and she'd been around, that was all. He'd wanted to hurt her then, because she was pitying him, and the last thing he had wanted from Lily Evans was pity. All through his sixth year, he had felt empty and rejected, and had probably spent even longer with his books than before, trying to forget about the number of times she had told him she didn't want to see him again. It had hurt him. Lily had been the only person he could trust and talk to, and in one word, he had turned her away from him, probably made her doubt her judgement of him.

The raindrop hit the bottom of the pane of glass, and Severus stared at where it had disappeared into a tiny puddle of water. That was what he had felt like, what he still felt like, every time he saw Lily with that bloody James Potter, happy and smiling. Squashed, small, alone. He wanted her to be happy, but he wanted her to be happy with him. There was so much he wanted to give her that it hurt him so much every time he saw her with Potter. He wanted so much to make up for what he'd done to her...he wanted her to like him as much as he liked her. There were so many things he wanted, but so few of them seemed likely since this break in their friendship. It seemed like they would never get back to where they had been, all because of him.

It had been his fault. Severus knew that everything that had happened that day had been his fault, and he didn't for one moment blame Lily for it. It was him that had said that word, him that had lashed out at her when she'd only been trying to help him. The blame was entirely his, and though it perhaps wasn't completely his fault that his attempts had not placated Lily, he wasn't going to get upset about that. He was still upset at himself, for goodness sake. He'd ruined everything. He wished so badly that he could go back in time, and find a way to get out of the situation. There were such things as Time Turners, he knew that, but would he be able to use one to go back and change how things had panned out that afternoon in June? He knew that there was a risk with Time Turners, that you weren't meant to change the course of history, but he wanted Lily to be his friend again more than life itself, enough to risk that. He couldn't forget what he had done to her that day, and it was killing him, slowly but surely, to know that she hated him. He wanted to change what he'd done, where he'd been; anything that would have stopped him doing what he'd done. He was an idiot. He really was.

It had been a nice day as well, which made everything seem worse. Severus had gone to sit by the lake as usual with one of his books - he thought it had been one that specialised in painful curses to use in retaliation, or something of the sort (shame he hadn't learned any of them before James Potter had appeared) - just minding his own business, as he so often did. It hadn't been too long previously that he'd spent time with Lily and he'd already been looking forward to their next secret meeting in the little copse that stood a short distance from the lake. It had just been a normal day; the odd comment about the state of his robes, which had been in desperate need of replacing, or his hair, but other than that Severus had been perfectly content to spend time in his own company, knowing that in a week or so, he'd be able to catch up with Lily. And then it would be the summer holidays, when he could spend six weeks with her without having to worry about what the rest of his house would say about him, a pure-blood fanatic at that, being best friends with a muggle-born Gryffindor. The summer holidays were the worst times of Severus' year because he had to see what his father had done to his mother over the year, and how little money he'd given her out of what he took to the pub, but they were the best times too. He got to spend time with Lily. How much better did that get?

Of course, one had to trust the Gryffindors to mess everything up. He didn't know how it had happened, but the Gryffindors in his year seemed to be worst than in the other years. It was because they had Potter and Black as their ringleaders, that was what it was. Severus didn't think he'd met two more arrogant, self-obsessed gits in his life, or two people he hated quite as much; considering that his father beat him up and was constantly drunk (although no-one knew about this; it was something that he was going to talk with him to the grave, because abuse from your father is not a topic that appears all too often in conversation, and he didn't want more pity from anyone) that was really saying something. Severus did hate his father, there was no denying that, and he hated himself for leaving his mother to deal with the man during the term time. He didn't know what sort of things Tobias put Eileen through, and he wasn't sure he wanted to know either. He'd never had a good relationship with his father. It seemed to Severus that the man who was meant to be a role model for him, that was meant to have been guiding him through his life with a firm but fair hand, and everything else that a boy's father was meant to do for his son, spent more time at the pub than he did at home. Severus only went home for the summer holidays unless his mother wrote to ask him to come back home sooner - not that it was much of a home - but he rarely saw his father during those six weeks, because he was spending money that could have been used to buy Severus new uniform, or something else he needed, on drink after drink after drink.

Uniform. That had been the thing that Potter and his gang had decided to tease Severus about two years ago. He knew that he didn't have the best clothes, or even the not-quite-so-good clothes. He didn't have the money to have new clothes, because his father drank everything except what his mother begged for, and had to make do with second-hand. It had been like that almost all his life, and he hated it almost as much as he hated not speaking to Lily anymore. It wasn't his fault that his robes were worn around the elbows, and extremely tatty when you got close up, was it? He couldn't help that; it was his father's fault, but no-one would buy that. No-one would buy him new robes either, but that was beside the point. The first thing that he was going to do when he got himself a job, whatever job it was, was buy himself a new set of robes. New ones. No more second hand rubbish for Severus, thanks very much. He'd lived in other people's cast offs his whole life. For once, he wanted to own something that was his, and his alone. Was that too much to ask? Apparently it was, because not everyone seemed to appreciate how horrible it was to not have nice new robes, to be the scruffy kid next to a year full of people with tailor-made cloaks, swooping past as if to tease him about the fact that his robes didn't so much swoop as droop. Bloody second hand rubbish.

It had all started off as harmless, or at least relatively harmless, teasing, as it so often did. Severus had tried his best to ignore the Gryffindors, because they were just arrogant idiots who thought they were so much better than he was. Severus would have been fine if Potter hadn't taken it a step too far, and performed the Levicorpus charm on him. Suddenly, he had found himself hanging upside down about the ground without any prior warning, his book falling to the floor (that had annoyed him because several of the pages had fallen out, and not being numbered, he'd never managed to work out where they went) and his robes had dropped over his head, revealing his underwear (which was as worn as the rest of his clothes) for all the world to see. The humiliation had been unbearable. While he couldn't say he liked it, Severus could cope when the Gryffindors just taunted him from afar. In the moment it had taken James Potter to say the curse, that had changed. Severus was no longer comfortable; he felt trapped.

Trapped was a feeling that he felt all too often, though normally he managed to conceal it pretty will. However, that had been the last straw. He'd simply not been able to take it anymore; the humiliation, the jeering from the crowd that Potter had obviously prepared in advance; nothing would let Severus forgive James, not even the act he had done last year, which if anything had only heightened Severus' irritation by making him owe something to Potter. Perhaps it would have been best if Black had let him be killed by the werewolf, because then at least, he wouldn't have to deal with the consequences of the actions he committed while finding himself upside down, worn underwear and all, in the midst of a circle of laughing faces, without a wand. He hadn't wanted Lily to see him like that; hopeless, mortified. As soon as he'd seen her face in the crowd, he'd silently willed her to go away. He could deal with a lot of stick, but to have Lily pity him; that was the thing he wanted least in the entire world. Pity from anyone was terrible, but from Lily, it was a hundred times worse. What happened next was a bit of a blur; he only remembered calling her a 'mudblood'.

Mudblood. Even now, the word stuck in his throat, and he cringed just to think about it. He didn't blame Lily for walking away, nor Potter for dropping him on the ground. He didn't blame Lily for refusing to talk to him, or even to listen to his mountainous apologies. The word was a despicable one, and he knew that it was one that he would never again use. However, a part of him just wished that she would listen to him just for five minutes. It would make him feel so much better to know that she had heard his side of his story, even if it made no difference in the long run. Perhaps he was possessive, but he couldn't let her go like this. She was the only friend he had, and through his own stupidity, he had lost her too. Now he had no-one, and he wanted her back. Even if he had to beg at her feet, he wasn't going to allow himself to spend the rest of the year shut up in the common room, staring out the window on his own, using books as a mechanism to avoid talking to other people. If he did that, where would that leave him for the future?

He didn't want to think about what was going to befall him in years to come. Maybe his outlook on things would be different if Lily forgave him, but she'd once said that at one point in their lives, they would be fighting on opposite sides. This seemed truer now than ever before. It should have been something that he didn't care about, seeing how their friendship no longer existed, but he found that he cared a lot. Like the raindrops on his window pane, their paths were bound to cross sooner or later, and he didn't want to hurt Lily. More. He didn't want to hurt Lily more than he already had. He really had no option once he left school, though. What the man who called himself the Dark Lord was doing was what Severus believed to be right, and though he knew that Lily would never speak to him again for joining ranks...wait, that wasn't an issue, since she wasn't talking to him anyway...well, he had people who could be his friends there. People he'd hung out with when he was younger, before they'd left. He'd just go back to being friends with them. It wouldn't be too hard. Lily had told him she didn't want to see him again. Therefore, it wasn't such a big issue, to get himself caught up in something that would really mean that he could never get her to forgive him, did it?

Hm, who was he trying to kid? He wanted Lily to forgive him, of course he did. He would do anything to get her to just talk to him again, had already tired his hardest. It was a lost cause. One word, and their friendship had ended, just like that. One word, and their meetings under the trees were just distant memories, the happy feeling he used to get when he knew Lily would be coming over any moment gone. One measly, bloody little word. Gosh, he was an idiot. A year and a half on, and he still couldn't forgive himself for being the person who broke up a perfectly good relationship, and it was something that plagued on his mind constantly. He didn't think he'd ever forgive himself.


End file.
